Lowell writer Ryder Jones releases serial novel Welcome to Westville from October through December

By Justin Tiemeyer - Contributing Writer

11/10/2024

On Wednesday, September 25, 2024, Ryder Jones posted an eerie photo in Lowell MI Community Chatter of the King Milling Company ensconced in fog, welcoming Lowellites (or Lowellians, as he debated the moniker) to the fictional town of Westville.

“Since this is a Lowell inspired story,” Jones wrote, “I’d love to hear from you. What do you love about this town? What nostalgia hits you the hardest? (Particularly from the 90s.) Have you ever experienced anything strange or uncanny in our quaint little town?”

Jones was born and raised in Lowell. He graduated from Lowell High School in 2006, and he has been the worship director at Impact Church for the past fourteen years. Himself now a husband and father of three, Jones reflects on the Lowell he remembers in the mid-90s in preparation for a serialized fiction project he is writing called Welcome to Westville.

Jones enjoyed reading and writing from an early age, and he spent his high school years reading Lord of the Rings and writing song lyrics, much like Led Zeppelin did in the late 1960s, except without the trappings of the rock and roll lifestyle. As Jones digested a new book, TV show, or videogame over the years, he would sit down with a notebook and jot out some worldbuilding ideas. “I wish I could come up with something like that,” he would tell himself, and then he finally asked himself, “Why don’t you try?”

It was not until early 2021 when Jones had the itch to write long form fiction. At that time, he mapped out and completed a fantasy novel that he claims will never see the light of day. Since then, Jones has spent three years honing his craft. “I’m ready to write a story for readers to check out,” Jones concluded.

Jones describes Welcome to Westville as a paranormal mystery thriller, purposely avoiding the term “horror.” “I don’t like the horror stamp,” Jones said. “The darker elements are there as representations of the darkness and heavy things that people face in life.”

Jones cited the writing of Stephen King as one of his primary influences, which is appropriate, considering that King wrote his 1996 novel The Green Mile as a series of six volumes released serially. While the majority of King’s bibliography is labelled horror, the fear often serves as a prompt for heroism, and some of King’s best works like IT, one of Jones’ favorites, are better when they confront sadness and discomfort than when they deal with terror. Similarly, Jones is interested in confronting human woes against a paranormal backdrop.

While the serial writing of King, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, along with horror podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale, seem like the most obvious predecessors for Welcome to Westville, Jones was much more heavily influenced by TV shows like X-Files, Twin Peaks, and Stranger Things. In fact, Jones is currently in the process of curating some companion playlists that will channel what it was like to live in Lowell in the 1990s. For Jones, Welcome to Westville is to the 1990s what Stranger Things is to the 1980s.

Whatever Jones’ pop culture influences, Welcome to Westville is ultimately a tribute to Lowell, the Lowell he witnessed while running down Main Street from Meijer to King Milling, the Lowell where both he and his own children were born and raised, the same Lowell that every reader of the Lowell Ledger is familiar with, just with cryptids, maybe.

When asked if Jones is worried that people reading Welcome to Westville might take his story a little too seriously and start demanding that King Milling tell the truth about its clandestine, underground laboratories, Jones made it clear that he is not trying to implicate any real people or organizations with his writing. When he imagined mysterious dealings underneath the towering silos, it was just that, his imagination, and primary research was conducted with the consent of the Doyle family, Lowell police chief Christopher Hurst, and the staff at City Hall. “This is meant to be a work of fiction,” Jones said. “You’re removed from the times we’re in a bit.”

Jones acknowledged that it is an election year during an era of hyperpolarization and conspiracy theories where everyone seems to have a hairpin trigger, but Welcome to Westville takes readers back to the mid-90s when then President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, worked with John Kasich and a predominantly Republican House of Representatives to balance the budget and not everybody was at everybody else’s throats. Jones wants to stomp down the acrimony and connect people through their mutual, shared experiences. “There’s been a rash of hard things our community has gone through, like suicides and really tragic car wrecks,” Jones said. “It’s kind of like trying to process a lot of what our community has gone through.”

The first installment of Welcome to Westville, titled “To The Marrow”, dropped Friday, October 25, giving readers an opportunity to enjoy it the weekend before Halloween. The remainder of the serial novel will be told one week at a time through December 20, boldly declaring that spooky season lasts from Labor Day through New Year’s Eve. To follow the story, head on over to Jone’s Substack at ryderhamiltonjones.substack.com. The whole novel is available to subscribers for free with bonuses like curated playlists for paid subscribers.